The use of sensors to provide effective surveillance of wide areas is becoming increasingly common. Consider a specified area where harmful objects may be placed, such as explosives, biological agents, or chemical substances. A fixed number of sensors are installed throughout the area, where each of these sensors provides observations on one or more locations within the area. The observations of these sensors are combined through a data fusion process in order to assess whether an object is actually present at one or more of the observed locations or not. Since the number of sensors that can be placed is limited, it is critically important to determine optimal locations for these sensors. In some applications, many sensors may be installed, but only a limited number of these sensors can be activated simultaneously.
Sensors are also used for intrusion detection. Defense against intrusion may be necessary to protect large areas like a border between countries, oil and gas pipelines, strategic facilities like nuclear reactors, industrial complexes, military bases, etc. Again, placing the sensors optimally is vitally important in order to achieve appropriate protection against intruders who might approach the protected area from different directions.
A related topic focuses on the optimal location of emergency facilities, such as emergency rooms, fire departments, and police stations. It is convenient to represent an area by a network, where each node represents a neighborhood, e.g., a square of dimension 100×100 meters. A link interconnecting a pair of nodes represents possible movement from one node to the other and the link metric represents the distance (or travel time) between the end-nodes. A typical problem is to place a limited number of emergency facilities at a subset of these nodes so that the distance (or travel time) from any node to the closest facility is minimized. This is a well-known problem in the literature, referred to as the network minimax location problem or the vertex center problem. A related problem, known in the literature as the set covering problem, minimizes the cost of installing facilities at a subset of the nodes so that each of the nodes is within a specified distance (or travel time) from the closest facility. L. V. Green and P. J. Kolesar, “Improving Emergency Responsiveness with Management Science”, Management Science, 50, 1001-1014, 2004 present the state-of-the-art of emergency responsiveness models.
The optimal locations of emergency facilities under the network minimax location problem are not unique as there may be numerous solutions that provide the best possible service to the worst-off location. Hence, it would be attractive to find which solution from among all minimax solutions should be selected. W. Ogryczak, “On the Lexicographic Minimax Approach to Location Problems”, European Journal of Operational Research, 100, 566-585, 1997 presents an algorithm to find a lexicographic minimax solution to the location problem. As in the minimax network location problem, any specific location is served by a single facility, specifically, by the closest facility to that location. The lexicographic minimax solution is the best minimax solution in the sense that ordering the service provided to the locations (in terms of distance or travel time from closest facility) from the worst to the best, the resulting ordered vector is the lexicographically smallest possible ordered vector. Such a solution is referred to as an equitable solution.
K. Chakrabarty, S. S. Iyengar, H. Qi, and E. Cho, “Grid Coverage for Surveillance and Target Location in Distributed Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Computers, 51, 1448-1453, 2002 formulate a sensor location problem as a set covering problem which minimizes the cost of installing sensors at a subset of the nodes so that each of the nodes is within a specified distance (or travel time) from a specified number of sensors.
This invention focuses on placing a limited number of sensors in order to achieve an equitable coverage of all locations, using a lexicographic maximin objective. The coverage level provided to any specific location may depend on the locations of multiple sensors that monitor the location and on the properties of the sensors. This is a significant extension of the paper above by W. Ogryczak, and the method used there cannot be extended to solve the problem addressed by this invention. H. Luss, “On Equitable Resource Allocation Problems: A Lexicographic Minimax Approach”, Operations Research, 47, 361-378, 1999 provides an exposition of various equitable resource allocation models and solution methods; however, none of these can be applied to this invention.